Exquisite Pain

Following their phenomenal sell out success last year in London, Forced Entertainment return to Riverside Studios with the London premiere of a new work EXQUISITE PAIN, based on a text from France’s most famous conceptual artist - SOPHIE CALLE. From Tuesday 1 – Sunday 6 November.

Adapting Sophie Calle’s work EXQUISITE PAIN for the stage marks a first for Forced Entertainment, never having worked before on a text written by someone else. In response to Calle’s text they have created a simple and moving work for two performers, about love, loss and the stories we tell ourselves when things go wrong. EXQUISITE PAIN tells how one person comes to terms with trauma

Sophie Calle’s original work was the product of a period of intense grief she experienced when a relationship broke up. She dealt with this by recounting her misery to everyone she met – friends, acquaintances and strangers, asking them to share with her the stories of their worst moments. Forced Entertainment have based their new performance on Calle’s project – a catalogue of suffering from break-ups to deaths, disappointments and bad dentistry, exploring how the forces of language, memory and forgetting move to contain, preserve or erase events.